by Natalie Dean
“If… if someone tries to kill us?” he whispered. “I thought you escaped.”
“I did. And they probably won’t even see us, but if they do, we need to be prepared.”
He looked terrified. She didn’t blame him for that either. He pulled over, scooted over into the passenger seat, and let her take charge at the wheel. She liked the truck. It felt like power. Stupid, unrealistic, unnecessary power, but power nevertheless.
She eased onto the road and kept picking up speed. She had always had a knack for driving. She didn’t even have an accident until she was 29, when some idiot had plowed her car coming out of a parking lot. As she liked to remind everyone, it wasn’t her fault.
“Hey,” Adrianna finally said to The Celtic. “Thanks for coming back for me.”
He had been uncharacteristically quiet since he had smiled earlier that day, when they had made a connection. He hadn’t said a thing the whole trip; he had just sat silently in the back seat, studying her chair with his arms folded across his chest.
When she spoke to him, he gave her the saddest smile she had ever seen before it wilted. “You would have done the same.”
“You were right about the direction we were walking,” she said, hoping to cheer him up.
“Yeah.”
She gave up. Obviously, he didn’t want to talk and she couldn’t force him to. She didn’t really wonder why he was so silent. According to him, he’d be killed long before he got to trial. Every mile that inched by, the closer he became to what he felt was sure death. She was starting to believe him. At first, she’d assumed he was exaggerating, but after seeing the rather professional system The Owl had going, she started to see that he had been being honest.
She thought about that the entire way towards town; if the Owl had found both of them out there instead of just her, The Celtic would have been dead. They both would have been out in the forest somewhere, dead. It was just good luck that they had found her instead.
If the Owl figured out that The Celtic was going to testify against him, he’d figure out a way to kill him. You didn’t get to be the head of an organization like that without a little expertise. She had no doubt that somehow, someway, someone was going to kill The Celtic before he could testify unless the whole organization toppled.
She thought about Agent Stone, and that he would never believe Adrianna’s warnings about The Owl. Then if The Celtic wound up dead, Stone would release a statement saying that the FBI had no idea that anyone was coming to kill him and that investigators were looking into it.
She was silent the rest of the drive. The GPS clicked down way too slowly. According to it, they were merely ten miles from the city. They’d been an hour and a half away when they first got in the truck. Now that they were getting so close, she was starting to get nervous. Things rarely worked out that easily for her. Normally, she had to fight something right at the very end.
So she wasn’t too surprised when she saw the barricade.
It was obviously The Owl’s men. Cops didn’t carry heavy assault rifles, but they had somehow gotten ahold of some cars and tossed some flashing lights on top. Even worse, they were wearing uniforms. Your casual driver would see them as genuine cops, stop, and keep driving when the killers figured out that Adrianna and The Celtic weren’t inside.
However, for the case of the rich kid, he had picked them up. He would be promptly dealt with should he have been driving. Adrianna, on the other hand, knew exactly what to do. The moment she recognized the face of the main cop—the biker—she gunned it.
The engine roared, the tires spun, and they zoomed towards the barricade. It was a sizeable blockade—several fake cop cars lined up. If they’d happened upon a small city car, Adrianna would have had literally no faith in being able to bust through. However, since they’d come across such a monster pickup, the cop cars didn’t stand a chance.
The truck slammed into the first car as the killers scattered. The grille smashed through the car without hardly a jolt, but the second car made it stutter for a second. The truck crawled over the carcasses and they were on their way, with broken sirens screaming angrily.
Before they were gone, Adrianna rolled down the window and gave the killers the middle finger salute. They opened fire on the back of the truck, but by that time, they were too far gone. Only a few bullets hit them, although one did shatter the back window.
“Bye, boys!” Adrianna yelled back. She had no idea if they could actually hear her, but it made her feel hardcore to say it.
But then she realized that they hadn’t really missed. The low tire alarm appeared on the dash. A tire must have been blown. She glanced in the mirror. The monster back left tire was flapping madly.
“We need to stop!” the kid yelled. “That’s not good for my truck.”
“Uh,” The Celtic said, speaking for the first time. “I don’t think that’s an option.”
“Why not?” the kid protested, apparently more concerned about his car. “We’ve left them behind!”
“Because those weren’t their only cars,” The Celtic said right about the time that four cars roared around the corner behind him.
Chapter 9
Time appeared to slow down for Adrianna. The squealing tires of the cars rounding the corner behind them, closing in. The flapping, flat tire slapping up against the rim. The kid screaming at an impressively high pitched voice.
You know, Adrianna’s brain said as time drifted to nearly a stop, I didn’t expect this stuff to happen when I took this assignment. She hadn’t. She’d expected your typical, routine bad-guy-catching. She’d track him using her powers. Catch him. Bring him back. Get her agency in the news. Good stuff. Maybe get into the lottery for a pay raise (yeah, right).
But then she had to get to grips with her situation. It was funny. Of all the time she’d spent on that crazy assignment, that exact moment is when everything got real clear for her. The Celtic was in the back, jumping up for something. Maybe he was trying to get a better look at their pursuers. She didn’t know. The kid was beside her, screaming unintelligible things.
And she realized that their lives were in her hands.
If she failed, nobody would ever now what happened to them. You’d think FBI agents were pretty hard to get rid of without anyone getting suspicious, but the most obvious contender would be none other than The Celtic. She could see it now: Runaway Killer Murders Prize FBI Agent?
Really, there wasn’t any other option but to succeed. Luckily, Adrianna thrived under pressure.
They wanted to kill them?
Come. And. Get. Her.
She gunned the engine. The truck powered through its flat tire and roared off. The cars chasing them were going to catch them. If their getaway truck hadn’t been damaged, they might have stood a chance, but slowed like they were, they weren’t going to outrun anyone anytime soon.
“Drive!” yelled The Celtic. “Drive, drive, drive!”
“That’s what I’m doing!” she yelled back.
“Oh my God!” screamed the kid. “We’re gonna dieeeee!”
“Shut up!” Adrianna said sweetly.
One out of four cars roared up beside them. Adrianna promptly cut the wheel towards him. He didn’t see that tactic coming and swerved off the road. He plowed a fence and slammed into a tree. Although the car didn’t explode into a ball of flame like Adrianna had been hoping, the driver did sail out of the window.
“Did you see that?” yelled Adrianna childishly. “That was awesome!”
And then the other car, which had been sneaking up on her, shot at her. The first bullet slammed into the radio, which somehow turned it on to an ear-shattering volume playing a classic rendition of You Ain’t Nothing but A Hound Dog by Elvis Presley.
The second bullet, however, missed the radio and shot Adrianna in the forearm.
Getting shot really doesn’t hurt at first because the shock’s just starting to kick in. Then, after a moment, it feels like someone has jabbed a red-hot poker into your arm.
/> She swerved towards him, but he had seen that already, so he slammed on the brakes and avoided being run off the road.
“Bikes!” The Celtic yelled.
She twisted around to see two killers jump into the pickup bed from bikes. The bikes flew away, but the two men were standing in the bed, so they didn’t need them anymore.
Adrianna slammed on the brakes, sending one guy flying over the top of the cab. For a second, Adrianna felt pretty sure that he was going to get all the way over the front and get run over, but at the last second, his hand shot out and caught the bumper right in front of the right light. His legs were dragging along the ground, but he drew his gun and started firing away at them.
The window splintered from the bullets. Adrianna fumbled with the controls and switched on the lights. For the first time in history, the high-powered LED lights did something helpful and blinded the guy. He fired off a couple more shots randomly, yelled, and fell off.
They felt a brief bump as they ran him over.
“Oh my God!” screamed the kid, who was by that time firmly in the grasp of shock.
“You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog!” Elvis accused from the radio loudly.
Meanwhile, while everyone had been distracted by the guy hanging off the bumper, the other biker jumped into the back seat from the broken window. In the flashes of his face that Adrianna got, she recognized him as the creepy biker that had tracked her at first.
The Celtic, startled, didn’t react at first. After that split second of surprise, he tore into the biker like a mad dog. For the first time, Adrianna got to see his fighting first hand. She’d seen little clips of him as she studied the target, but that was against another professional fighter.
The biker was a capable and tough man, but up against The Celtic, he didn’t stand much of a chance. The fight was brief but ferocious. Even hampered by his gunshots, The Celtic was fearsome. Adrianna felt just a flash of surprise, and pride in The Celtic.
Although The Celtic was winning, the biker was much bigger of a man, so he had the upper hand strength-wise. He shoved The Celtic against the door. Adrianna couldn’t see much because of her position as the driver, but the next thing she knew, the back door was open and the biker had been tossed out.
The last car still trailing them swerved to avoid hitting the biker, overcorrected, and ditched itself between some pines. That was the last of them, for now.
“You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog,” Elvis said, and then the song cut off. The respite was tragically brief, though, as another sound came blaring on equally loudly afterwards. The kid tried to turn it off with shaking hands to no avail.
“Hey, you’re bleeding,” said The Celtic, leaning up between Adrianna and the kid to see better.
“Yeah, one of them shot me. I’ll be fine.” She winced, but she hid it. “Went straight through.” She caught sight of his face, which was bruised up. The biker guy hadn’t gone quietly off into the night. “Oh jeez.”
“It looks worse than it feels,” he assured. She didn’t doubt it. He had years of experience getting his face bashed up.
She pressed her forearm against her inner thigh. It was barely bleeding. Luckily, the guy hadn’t been too good of a shot. She’d been scared he might have gotten her badly.
She looked back towards the door. The truck wasn’t going to like it, but it would make it. Luckily, she was a good enough driver to make it the next ten or so miles to town. She had no doubt that they would make it. She’d known it was too easy for them to bust through the fake barricade, but she doubted that they had any more men up their sleeves… yet. Sure, The Owl would probably round up some more, but they would be relatively safe in the city.
“You okay?” she asked the kid. Miraculously, he hadn’t been injured whatsoever. She would’ve been crushed with guilt if something had happened to him.
He nodded silently, eyes wide.
“We’ll get you in to the police when we get into the city,” she told him. “They’ll take care of you.”
“W-what… what are you two g-gonna do?” he stuttered. “You taking him in?”
Sometimes it amazed her to see how ordinary people reacted to her everyday life. Sure, it wasn’t every day that she got into an outrageously dangerous car chase, but it wasn’t rare either.
But he’d asked a question, one that she didn’t want to answer because she didn’t know yet. She couldn’t turn The Celtic over. If anything, the last day or so had proved to her that he wasn’t safe with the general public. She had no choice but to keep him off the grid.
“We’re going to a safe house,” she finally said.
The Celtic’s eyes widened in surprise, but he didn’t speak. Instead, he sat back in the seat as they drove on into the city.
Chapter 10
Descending into the city was a bit of a culture shock for Adrianna. She went from way out in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or common conveniences whatsoever to the city, where everything that anyone could possibly want happened daily.
At first, it was just a couple houses, their owners woefully unaware of the killers lurking in the forest mere miles away. Then there was a convenience store, and then a little while later, a bar. Soon, buildings were springing out of the ground left and right until nearly all the precious greenery had been replaced with buildings.
As soon as she could, they ditched the truck. They parked it off the road somewhere on the outskirts of the city.
“We can’t leave my truck,” protested the kid, who had admittedly pulled the unlucky straw that night. He’d probably been headed to a party somewhere based on his appearance and breath (he smelled drunk) and he’d had the awful luck of coming across The Celtic and Adrianna. “It’s very expensive.”
“You can come back for it,” Adrianna said, handing him the keys. “But we can’t take it with us.”
“Why not?” he protested. “Someone’s gonna steal it!”
“It’s too bad if they do,” Adrianna said, “But those guys that are chasing us are looking for it.”
“….Oh.”
She winked. “There ya go. Don’t worry. I’ll get the agency to pay for repairs since you basically saved our lives. It’ll all be back to new once we get this all wrapped up.”
“How long is that gonna be?”
She hesitated. She actually had no idea how long it would take to bring down The Owl. He was obviously clever. He had avoided detection for years. Adrianna was fairly high up in the agency. There weren’t long lists of things she didn’t know, but she had never even heard of The Owl. Moreover, she wasn’t confident that Stone would believe her. More than likely he’d take a month or two to figure out whether he should take her seriously.
“I’ll look into it,” he’d grumble when she would tell him, but she knew better. He never looked into it. She had no idea how he’d kept his position after all those years. Sure, he would eventually, but it would take him entirely too long to discover that there really was a murderous cult of thugs working for a mysterious top dog, apparently killing off professional fighters systematically.
So they left the truck and continued on foot for a little while. Finally, after about ten minutes of walking, they were in the city. It felt good to see dozens of people around. Adrianna had never loved the city. In fact, she’d been born and raised a country girl. She’d gone to public school and had internet at her house and all that… but she wasn’t a creature of the city. It was a strange and unsettling experience for her to actually be thankful for everyone bustling around her. If anyone caught them, they would be pretty hesitant to open fire in such a crowded place. At least, that’s what Adrianna was hoping.
They split ways after getting into the city. The Celtic and Adrianna stood from afar, watching the boy disappear into the police building.
“Think he’s going to be okay?” The Celtic asked.
Adrianna sighed and was reminded about her rib. The adrenaline of the last day had pumped through her enough so that sh
e hardly had noticed. Now that she was starting to cool down, she started to feel it again. Luckily such an injury didn’t take too long to heal. A couple more days and she wouldn’t feel it at all.
She was amazed they were still alive. Sure, in action movies all the heroes live, but in real life, it didn’t turn out that way. Humans weren’t all that tough. Take a bullet to the chest? You were probably going to die. Luckily, though, all the wounds they had endured were painful but not life-threatening.
“Hello?” The Celtic said, waving a hand a foot or two in front of her. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
She led him to the safe house. She had spare everything there: clothes, phone, food, antibiotics, you name it. More importantly, it was her safe house, not the FBI’s. If the Owl had a man on the inside, they wouldn’t know about it.
But her biggest worry wasn’t really about The Owl. It was about the FBI. If Stone figured out that she had apprehended The Celtic and hadn’t turned him in to a ticker tape parade yet, he would not hesitate to send other agents after her. She had to be stealthy. Luckily, she knew how the FBI operated, so she felt relatively confident of her ability to fly under the radar.
“Where are we going?” The Celtic finally asked after a good time of walking. “I thought once we got into the city, we wouldn’t have to deal with any more freakin’ walking.”
“My safe house,” she said.
He paused before speaking. “Why didn't you take me into the police station? We were right there.”
“You’re right. The Owl would kill you, and I’m not interested in having that on my conscience.” She sounded professional, but maybe she was hoping that The Celtic had a plan to get out of this mess somehow. That he would manage to overpower her and escape, never to be caught by the long arm of the law. Or that he could prove his innocence. She had no doubt that he was innocent. The more she was around his aura, the more confident she was that she could trust his word. In court, though, “a hunch” or a “gut feeling” didn’t tend to fly too high.